I'm not sure whether the news team that was sent to cover the Tea Party rally in Tifton, Georgia, realised they were talking to the drummer of perhaps the greatest US rock'n'roll band of all time. In fairness, it's difficult to imagine how anyone could look less like the drummer of perhaps the greatest US rock band of all time than the 66-year-old woman on the NBC report. But perhaps Maureen Tucker didn't volunteer the information on the grounds that she was speaking for herself rather than the Velvet Underground when she decried the US's drift "towards socialism".

The reaction wasn't surprising. The kind of person who took to the comment threads a while back to announce that the Stooges' back catalogue had been entirely devalued because Iggy Pop advertised car insurance, took to the comment threads again. The Velvet Underground and Nico was no longer an epochal work of art, they said, because 44 years after it was recorded, the woman who drummed on it had revealed herself to have different political views to their own. Here was evidence of the rock fan's unique inability to disassociate the art from the artist who made it. You don't get many art buffs announcing that The Taking of Christ isn't much cop because Caravaggio murdered someone.

Furthermore, the Velvet Underground's music doesn't express a single political view, unless there's a hitherto-unheard demo version of Venus in Furs that goes "shiny boots of leather, worn by the capitalist oligarchs in order to cruelly stamp on the proletariat". We assume they're leftwing liberals because they sang about drugs and sex and transvestites, but they could just as easily be radical rightwing libertarians.

You could argue that the principles the Tea Party stand for suggest a bleak, brutal, self-centred view of humanity, but it's not as if the band's oeuvre is overflowing with goodwill towards their fellow man. "The Velvets hated everything. They turned their backs to the audience," said Andy Warhol's assistant Ronnie Cutrone. "I didn't like that love and peace shit," Tucker later recalled. In a certain light, that sounds not unlike something Sarah Palin might be caught saying off-mic.